A forgotten short story written by a young Ian McEwan in the mid-1970s, about a doctor who specialises in maiming men at the behest of their wives, has been uncovered by a lecturer in modern literature at Roehampton University. It is the first of a clutch of early works by contemporary writers to resurface.

The two-page story, known as Untitled, appeared in the winter 1976 edition of literary journal Tri-Quarterly, and lives up to McEwan's early reputation for having a gothic imagination.

In Untitled, a woman visits a doctor's surgery to request the removal of her husband's bladder, genitalia, tongue and tendons in both wrists. "A lot of women come … they want their husbands to need them, more than that, to be dependent on them."

The narrative continues:

They come to me. I recommend a bladder job. The man without his bladder (he doesn't know he's lost it) has a terrible secret. He wets his pants. He cannot function socially. He hurries home after work, just like he used to. He shares the secret with his wife. To his relief she is sympathetic, understanding, loving. It is a secret he can share with no one else in the world.

The story, along with a second early McEwan work, Intersection, were discovered by Sebastian Groes, a senior lecturer in modern English literature at Roehampton University. Untitled appears in the latest edition of Groes's book, Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives; Intersection, which was published in Tri-Quarterly in 1975, may feature in a future edition.

"People have forgotten about the early works," said Groes, "but they give an insight into the obsessions which recur in later works, and there are early explorations of form." He hopes to reintroduce early stories by Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes.

In Intersection, four people collide on the street on "an ordinary Tuesday morning". The story shows glimpses of McEwan's future work. "You can trace the form of Saturday," Groes said.

Intersection begins:

We all killed him there on the pavement outside the shops, together we all crushed the life out of him, lying there expecting help. That is how I see it, and since I was the closest, since it was my lips, my knee, my forearm, you should see something in the way I see it … I was the one you all made kiss him as he died there under my face, and I was the one who kissed him, though I had no choice. We all had choice and no choice that morning. That old lady who screamed sharply tried to turn back into the crowds, she was choosing all the time … Those at the back, the ones I never saw, only felt – they were as guilty.

Critic and academic John Mullan said McEwan's early stories were characterised by "a nasty and unlikely thesis, so logically pursued that for the length of the story you believed it (the precis always makes it sound absurd)."

Intersection and Untitled were published around the same time as McEwan's debut collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, which came out in 1975 and earned him the nickname Ian Macabre.